| 单词 | comet |
| 释义 | comet (once / 876 pages) n A comet is a small, icy object that orbits the sun and has a long "tail" of gas. Some comets can be seen from Earth every few years, while others pass by once in a person's lifetime. Comets are made of ice, dust, and tiny pieces of rock, but to people on Earth, they look like streaks or smudges across the night sky. When the Earth's orbit takes it through one of these comets' tails, their dust burns up in our atmosphere and results in a meteor shower. In Old French, the word was comete, ultimately from a Greek root, kometes, which literally means "long-haired star." WORD FAMILYcomet: comet-like, cometary, cometic, comets USAGE EXAMPLESGenerally, meteors occur when Earth passes through dusty comet trail. Washington Post(Dec 31, 2016) Rosetta was the first spacecraft to orbit a comet and to follow one around the sun. Wall Street Journal(Dec 30, 2016) At midnight, we found a cozy spot by the Charles River and gazed upward, watching for the stray dust of an ancient comet. New York Times(Dec 23, 2016) n (astronomy) a relatively small extraterrestrial body consisting of a frozen mass that travels around the sun in a highly elliptical orbit Hyper estraterrestrial body, extraterrestrial object a natural object existing outside the earth and outside the earth's atmosphere |
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